Does the Color of a Ball affect its ability to be Caught?
Ben
Introduction
What is the first thing that you would look at if you went into an all red room with a blue dot on the wall? The blue dot of course but does the color of an object affect whether the eye recognizes it and sends a signal to the brain in a shorter amount of time? In an a study by P.J. Rowe and P. Evans, 61 men and 64 females forehand rallied different colored racquetballs. Out of the different colored racquetballs used, subjects using the blue balls scored better compared to yellow and green balls.
In my own version of this experiment I decided to test whether the color of a ball affected the brains reaction time and sent a signal to the hand quickly enough to catch the ball before it hit the ground. I decided to use Red, Green, and Blue colored balls because they are all primary colors. I also decided to use Yellow because it is a bright color which reflects light and irritates your eye. I thought that it would be interesting to add yellow to the primary colors in my test and see whether the brightness or eye irritation caused the eye to act differently and possibly react faster.
Procedure
In my test I used four different colored balls, red, yellow, blue, and green. In order to recreate the same trajectory every time for each ball I set up a PVC pipe for the balls to roll through and travel in the same direction at the same speed. First however I set put a 1ft long piece of blue masking tape on the ground with the longest side perpendicular to the longest side of a table directly next to it. Then 10ft away from the blue masking tape I put a chair with the front of the chair parallel to the longest side of the blue masking tape. Then on the table I raised the PVC pipe up so that the lowest point was 4ft off of the ground and the highest point was 4½ft off of the ground. Then I turned the PVC pipe so that it was linear to the blue masking tape and when I rolled a ball through the PVC it would fall onto the blue masking tape. Next I had the first test subject sit down on their knees directly behind the blue masking tape on the opposite side of the tape as the chair. I had the test subject stare at the chair and put their hands behind their back. Then I rolled the balls through the PVC pipe one at a time in the order of red, green, yellow, blue and recorded whether the balls were caught or not. I rolled each colored ball through 4 times for a total of 16 balls rolled through the PVC pipe and tested it on a total of 10 people.
Results
Each color ball was dropped 4 times for each test subject. Out of those 4 times these are the average number of times they were caught, with Yellow being the ball caught the most and Red being the color caught the least.
Averages number of times each ball was caugh for each subject:
Red: 2.4
Green: 2.9
Yellow: 3.1
Blue: 2.9
This is all of the data combined. The Blue bar represents the number of balls for each color that were caught while Red represents the number that were dropped. Yellow had the most catches and the fewest drops, Blue and Green had the same number of catches and the same number of drops and Red was caught the least out of any of the colors.
These T-Tests are a comparison of the number of times each colored ball was caught by each test subject compared to that of a different color. None of these results are significantly significant which suggests that with the data shown above I cannot come to a definite conclusion.
The results suggest that the easiest ball to catch is Yellow, with Blue and Green in 2nd, flowed by Red but because none of the T-Tests are statistically significant and due to the low amount of data I cannot say for certain that the color of each ball affected whether it could be caught or not. If another test was done the results could be the exact opposite. More experiments could be performed with more subjects. The increased amount of data from those tests could lead to a conclusion. Another factor that could have affected these tests was that we were in a crowded classroom with distractions and further experiments could be done in a controlled environment.
References
"Color Matters - Vision." Color Matters - Everything about color - from color expert Jill Morton. Color Matters. Web. 28 Jan. 2010.
Does the Color of a Ball affect its ability to be Caught?
BenIntroduction
What is the first thing that you would look at if you went into an all red room with a blue dot on the wall? The blue dot of course but does the color of an object affect whether the eye recognizes it and sends a signal to the brain in a shorter amount of time? In an a study by P.J. Rowe and P. Evans, 61 men and 64 females forehand rallied different colored racquetballs. Out of the different colored racquetballs used, subjects using the blue balls scored better compared to yellow and green balls.
In my own version of this experiment I decided to test whether the color of a ball affected the brains reaction time and sent a signal to the hand quickly enough to catch the ball before it hit the ground. I decided to use Red, Green, and Blue colored balls because they are all primary colors. I also decided to use Yellow because it is a bright color which reflects light and irritates your eye. I thought that it would be interesting to add yellow to the primary colors in my test and see whether the brightness or eye irritation caused the eye to act differently and possibly react faster.
Procedure
In my test I used four different colored balls, red, yellow, blue, and green. In order to recreate the same trajectory every time for each ball I set up a PVC pipe for the balls to roll through and travel in the same direction at the same speed. First however I set put a 1ft long piece of blue masking tape on the ground with the longest side perpendicular to the longest side of a table directly next to it. Then 10ft away from the blue masking tape I put a chair with the front of the chair parallel to the longest side of the blue masking tape. Then on the table I raised the PVC pipe up so that the lowest point was 4ft off of the ground and the highest point was 4½ft off of the ground. Then I turned the PVC pipe so that it was linear to the blue masking tape and when I rolled a ball through the PVC it would fall onto the blue masking tape. Next I had the first test subject sit down on their knees directly behind the blue masking tape on the opposite side of the tape as the chair. I had the test subject stare at the chair and put their hands behind their back. Then I rolled the balls through the PVC pipe one at a time in the order of red, green, yellow, blue and recorded whether the balls were caught or not. I rolled each colored ball through 4 times for a total of 16 balls rolled through the PVC pipe and tested it on a total of 10 people.
Results
Each color ball was dropped 4 times for each test subject. Out of those 4 times these are the average number of times they were caught, with Yellow being the ball caught the most and Red being the color caught the least.
Averages number of times each ball was caugh for each subject:
Red: 2.4
Green: 2.9
Yellow: 3.1
Blue: 2.9
This is all of the data combined. The Blue bar represents the number of balls for each color that were caught while Red represents the number that were dropped. Yellow had the most catches and the fewest drops, Blue and Green had the same number of catches and the same number of drops and Red was caught the least out of any of the colors.
These T-Tests are a comparison of the number of times each colored ball was caught by each test subject compared to that of a different color. None of these results are significantly significant which suggests that with the data shown above I cannot come to a definite conclusion.
T-Tests:
Red-Green: p=0.3974229171
Red-Yellow: p=0.2553875077
Red-Blue: p=0.448386093
Green-Yellow: p=0.5876990959
Yellow-Blue: p=0.6753309432
Green-Blue: p=1
Conclusions
The results suggest that the easiest ball to catch is Yellow, with Blue and Green in 2nd, flowed by Red but because none of the T-Tests are statistically significant and due to the low amount of data I cannot say for certain that the color of each ball affected whether it could be caught or not. If another test was done the results could be the exact opposite. More experiments could be performed with more subjects. The increased amount of data from those tests could lead to a conclusion. Another factor that could have affected these tests was that we were in a crowded classroom with distractions and further experiments could be done in a controlled environment.
References
"Color Matters - Vision." Color Matters - Everything about color - from color expert Jill Morton. Color Matters. Web. 28 Jan. 2010.Crowe, M., and D. O'Connor. "Eye colour and reaction time to visual stimuli in ...[Percept Mot Skills. 2001] - PubMed result." National Center for Biotechnology Information. Oct. 2001. Web. 28 Jan. 2010.
O'Connor, Anahad. "The Claim: Eye Color Can Have an Effect on Vision." The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia. The New York Times, 19 Jan. 2009. Web. 28 Jan. 2010.
"Primary Colors." Test Page for Apache Installation. Web. 28 Jan. 2010.
Rowe, PJ, and P. Evans. "Ball color, eye color, and a reactive motor skill." National Center for Biotechnology Information. PubMed, Aug. 1994. Web. 28 Jan. 2010.